A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medium containing information gathered from material including a source, and a data processing system for generating content for the medium and permitting access to the content.
B. Description of the Related Art
The communication and manipulation of ideas is limited by the forms in which they can be packaged and transported. Books in their modern, codex form are a substantial improvement on earlier forms in the amount of information that can be packaged together, the portability of that information, the speed with which the information can be accessed, and its suitability for commerce. A typical book might consist of 400 pages, contain 160,000 words, and weigh 4 pounds. It is possible to find books larger or smaller than this by perhaps a half-order of magnitude (factor of 3). Beyond this range, larger material tends to be broken into separate book volumes, as in encyclopedias, and smaller material tends to be grouped into book volumes, as in journals of scientific articles or collections of short stories.
Essentially, the size of books in terms of physical form and number of pages is determined first by what a reader finds convenient to carry and second by what the publisher finds economical to publish and distribute. Very large books or very expensive books exist, but tend to have limited markets and distribution. On the other hand, paperback pocket books, the books of truly mass circulation, conform carefully to a portable size and economical cost.
The cost in time of accessing information in a book is much lower than accessing information outside the book, such as the contents of other publications the book references. Access to additional material not previously assembled may mean a trip to the library or ordering from a publisher, processes requiring hours or even weeks. Moreover, even if all the referenced contents have been assembled, they would not share the book's portability, i.e. they could not be readily packed off to the beach or taken home from work.
These limitations on book size mean that it is not practical to publish a book together with the contents of the material it cites. Yet, references are often pursued as a consequence of reading the book. This use of books is part of a larger process called knowledge crystallization.
Knowledge crystallization includes collecting information, making sense of it, and authoring some new work based on the research and insight. An example would be writing a scientific research paper or authoring a business slide presentation.
The idea of electronic, hyperlinked books exists. For example, D. C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif. AFOSR-3223 (October 1962); T. H. Nelson, Literary Machines. Swarthmore, Pa.: Self-published (1981); and N. Yankelovich et al., “Intermedia: The Concept and Construction of a Seamless Information Environment,” IEEE Computer, vol. 21, pp. 81–96, 1988, developed hypertext systems in which documents were related to each other through links. Engelbart and Nelson's systems, however, emphasized merely linking in a new document that references other documents already in the system, and the links in the Engelbart, Nelson, and Van Dam systems must be explicitly authored.
J. R. Remde et al., “Superbook: An Automatic Tool for Information Exploration,” (1987) (presented at ACM Hypertext '87 Proceedings) and D. E. Egan, J. R. Remde et al., “Behavioral evaluation and analysis of a hypertext browser,” (1989) (presented at ACM CHI '89 Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, Austin, Tex.) describe a hyperlinked “Superbook” with integrated fisheye visualization and indexing. Creating an electronic Superbook from an existing paper statistics manual resulted in improved access time for information.
There are currently many electronic, hyperlinked books on the market. Typical of the genre are THAMES & HUDSON, ART 20: THE THAMES AND HUDSON MULTIMEDIA DICTIONARY OF MODERN ART (CD-ROM Ed. 1999) and HOPKINS TECHNOLOGY, COMPLETE ACUPUNCTURE (CD-ROM ed. 1997). These examples contain such features as searchable text, bookmarking, annotations, and writable notebooks.
E. GARFIELD, CITATION INDEXING—ITS THEORY AND APPLICATION IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND HUMANITIES (1979) discusses the use of citation indexing and cocitation analysis for analyzing the structure of document collections and the Science Citation Index. J. Mackinlay et al., “An Organic User Interface for Searching Citation Links,” (1995) (presented at ACM CHI '95 Conference on Human Factors in Software, Denver, Colo.) used online access to the Science Citation Index to create virtual visual collections for searching. E. H. Chi et al. “Visualizing the Evolution of Web Ecologies,” (1998) (presented at ACM CHI '97 Conference on Human Factors in Software) used bibliometric techniques, such as cocitation analysis, to visualize Websites. C. Chen and L. Carr, “Trailblazing the Literature of Hypertext: Author Co-citation Analysis (1989–1998),” (1999) (presented at Hypertext '99, Darmstadt, Germany) used cocitation analysis to visualize the literature of the Hypertext conference proceedings.
The prior systems, however, fail to adequately provide a user quick access to information related to a source material. Further, the prior systems fail to provide a visualization of source material and information related to a source material that can maximize the user's understanding of the material.